The Effect of Textual Marginal Glosses on Incidental Vocabulary Retention of Iranian EFL Students

The present study investigated the effect of marginal glosses (both L1 and
L2) on incidental vocabulary learning of EFL learners. The subject pool
consisted of 154 third-semester Iranian students enrolled at Azad University,
Central Branch. After administering a proficiency test, 90 homogeneous
students were assigned to two
experimental groups (X1 & X2) and one
control group. Afterwards, a 50 -item pretest was administered to verify
students’ unfamiliarity with the intended target words to be learned later.
Then the treatment began and X1 received L1 glosses and X2 received L2
glosses, and the control group received no glosses. Finally, a post-test, the
same as the pre-test with 10 familiar items deleted, was administered to
the three groups. A one-way ANOVA indicated that learners with access
to L2 or L1 marginal glosses demonstrated significantly greater retention
of word meanings. Additionally, a further analysis known as the Tukey test
was conducted to pinpoint exactly where the differences exist in a pair-wise
way. The results of this analysis showed that X2 outperformed X1 and the control group